THOROUGHLY MODERN MONA

Item: The University Press of America has issued a series called Contemporary Shakespeare, edited by A.L. Rowse, in which the texts are "modernized." "Thees" and "thous" are eliminated, obsolete words are translated. Hamlet's mother now lives in the rank sweat of a soiled, greasy bed rather than an enseamed one.

Item: Several new versions of the Bible (one titled The Book, and an edition published by Reader's Digest) are proliferating, in which the original Hebrew and Greek idioms are simplified and modernized into conventional, colloquial American English.

Item: MGM has signed a contract with Colorization, a Toronto company, to add computerized color to films like Yankee Doodle Dandy and Casablanca, films originally made in black and white.

Item: Giorgio Moroder's "revision" of Fritz Lang's silent film classic Metropolis deletes the titles, adds wipes and other transitional devices that were not part of the original film, and imposes a heavy disco-rock score with vocals by mediocrities like Adam Ant and Bonnie Tyler.

Any one of these would be distressing symptoms of a society without respect for the integrity of its own cultural history; together they portend a world of rampant revisionism, forever ransacking and revising masterworks of the past to conform to tastes and standards of modern times -- the "flavor-of- the-month" syn That MGM is going to alter its own corporate legacy is alarming but not surprising; movie studios have always been oblivious to the value of film as anything other than commercial artifact, and adding the rather hazy pastel color that results from computer alteration may make the films marginally more attractive to cable and cassette sales. That's the motive. But it will also distort the careful gradations and modulations that directors and photographers made in composing shots in What is alternately hilarious and enraging is the underlying, insidious idea that Jesus Christ, Shakespeare or Fritz Lang need "updating." Evidently, the morons responsible for this succession of travesties believe that art is a process of evolutionary excellence; that the product of 1985 is, ipso facto, superior to that of 1935 or 1605 or 26 A.D., that Robert Rauschenberg is inherently superior to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

In reality, a mark of any artist's work is whether or not his work, as he made it, survives his period and speaks to succeeding generations. Those poor souls who think they are seeing what Lang photographed or reading what Shakespeare wrote can hardly be expected to accurately gauge their worth if the work has been re-colored, re-scored, re-written and generally diddled with.

With Shakespeare the words are the words; take them or leave them, but don't try to change them. Rowse's edition of Shakespeare does things like delete the second person familiar, alter the Elizabethan contractions ("i'th' " becomes "in the") and subtly throw askew the rhythm of the blank verse. Words are changed; Hamlet no longer bears "fardels" but "burdens."

Well, now. Shakespeare loved a vast, occasionally bizarre vocabulary, and used obscure words to suit the shape of a line or its rhythm or the nature of a character. Those irregularities provide insights into his nature, that of his characters and the theater they were written for. To alter or delete them alters and deletes their meaning and bowdlerizes literature and history at the same time.

Rowse tries to justify himself when he writes, "Let the text be freed of superfluous difficulties, remove obstacles to let it speak for itself, while adhering conservatively to every line." This is a contradiction in terms. It presumes Shakespeare didn't really mean what he wrote and, well, a little red pencil to correct the occasional archaic word or phrase will help the old boy out.

But Shakespeare's politics and social assumptions have been obsolete for hundreds of years without affecting his literary worth or dramatic va

lidity. Admittedly, the vocabulary and grammar he uses demand effort that may be beyond the capabilities of TV-trained minds, but if you "modernize" him once, aren't you then compelled to do it every 20 years or so, continually bringing him up-to-date and making him, you know, "with it"?

With Metropolis, Giorgio Moroder reveals himself as a rock composer with more money than taste. Clearly inspired by the historically valid Kevin Brownlow version of Abel Gance's Napoleon -- valid because he reconstructed the film the director made, and didn't re-cut and re-direct it to suit his own ego -- Moroder inserted a few sequences that were originally cut from the film's American release, but he also cut out all the intertitles, using them as subtitles on the bottom of the screen, as in foreign films. It's precisely the sort of error a neophyte would make. Titles are just words that interrupt the flow of the film, right? So cut them out, keep them to a minimum and superimpose them on the action itself.

But the men and women who made silent films cut them to a specific rhythm --that and the tone of the visuals themselves were all they had to work with -- and the titles were part of that rhythm. The film moves at a sprint instead of a canter, a zippy procession of images. The typically brooding Lang pace is subverted and the film is turned into an MTV video. That low, rumbling sound you hear in the distance is the always painstaking, methodical Lang vibrating with rage in his grave.

The justification usually offered for these desecrations is that by removing some of the patina of age, by making the works more relevant (loathsome word), people -- read kids -- who would be otherwise alienated will get turned on by Shakespeare or silent movies -- or God.

Bosh. Likewise piffle. Cliffs Notes never turned anybody on to literature. If illiterates of whatever age or era are too ignorant to respond to anything old or difficult, and cannot "relate" to Shakespeare or Fritz Lang or any of the other accretions of genius that make up the mosaic referred to as serious culture, then let them leave them alone.

Shakespeare with the music, tautness, and irony removed in the name of easy reading isn't Shakespeare; Fritz Lang modified by a musical non-entity eager to smear the shellac of his trendiness over the work of a master is an outrage. Together, they are malignant mediocrities mangling the work of their dead, defenseless betters, destroying the validity of the past and obliterating the possibility of an informed collective memory. And memory, more than anything else, is the defining characteristic of humanity.

I can see it now: a computer-colored Citizen Kane, re-dubbed in Dolby stereo with a score by Marvin Hamlisch and a few Kenny Rogers vocals to spell out story points obscured by the cutting of some scenes that slowed up the film's pace. In extreme close-up, Orson Welles opens his mouth to gasp out his dying word.